


The Chimney-Sweep's Aunt

by ancientreader



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Child Labor, Gen, character death (not Holmes or Watson)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-08-31 20:26:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8592322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: In which Holmes is bested by a dying chimney-sweep, a retired music-hall artiste, and Dr. Watson; the episode does all four persons credit, and yet it is not an occasion for rejoicing.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [capt_facepalm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/capt_facepalm/gifts).



> I hope I've done justice to the good Dr. Watson, [capt_facepalm](http://capt-facepalm.livejournal.com/)! I greatly enjoyed researching and writing this, and thank you for welcoming the germ of plot that led me to it.
> 
> Thanks as always to my indefatigable beta team, [TSylvestris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/profile), [Chryse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chryse/profile), and [Frikshun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frikshun/profile).
> 
> Should you happen to be one of those people who, like me, take a peek at the bookmarks for stories you've read, please note that someone has mistakenly tagged this fic as including incest. It does not.

Not all my reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes concern that eminent detective’s cases; although these more personal notes must await publication until both my friend and I have gone from this world, I hope they will be of some interest to his biographers, as revealing much about the essential character of the man which even his great work cannot discover.

When Holmes tallied the occasions on which he had been bested, he omitted the episode I recount here, in which he was deceived by a dying chimney-sweep, an erstwhile music-hall artiste, and me. We sound an ill-assorted trio of conspirators, do we not? Yet I think — I hope — biographers and readers will agree that the episode does Holmes credit. It did all of us credit, I believe. 

And yet it was not an occasion for rejoicing. 

*

The story of how I, in concert with two others, bested the world’s greatest detective, begins one afternoon in late 1895. Holmes had been out for three or four hours; he returned looking troubled, and sank into his chair to smoke in silence for some time. I thought it best not to intrude upon his brown study; eventually, I was sure, my friend would confide in me. And so indeed, following his second pipeful, he did.

“Watson,” he said, “how would you feel about our admitting a third to our comfortable quarters? The intrusion would require our turning this sitting-room into a sick-room, I am afraid; but the transformation would be rather a short one.”

“And afterward,” I asked, somewhat startled, “would our new cohabitant remain?”

“Oh!” said Holmes, “no; no, indeed.” 

His knuckles were white upon his pipe. “Why, Holmes,” I said, “if you have some friend in need of help, of course you must bring him here, and I will aid him in any way I am able.”

He smiled a little at that. “Well, I see that you have understood me,” he said. “It is an old acquaintance — Tommy Jencks is his name. His sharp eyes proved a signal help to me in a case, early on in my career, when he was but a boy of eight or ten. Since that time he has become a carpenter — quite a knowledgeable one; it is he whom I consult when some question concerning the properties of various woods, or technical matters of joinery, arises. He is a great admirer of the tales you publish in the _Strand_ , you know. And — Watson, you will follow me when I tell you that before 1875 he was apprenticed to a chimney sweep.”

*

Indeed, I did follow; and though I had never before so much as heard the name of Tommy Jencks, my heart went out to him.

Perhaps by the time my narrative is published no-one will remember the soot-wart. That would be a blessing. It is, indeed, probable that this terrible malady will have faded into oblivion, as it already seems beginning to do; for since ’75, and the Chimney Sweepers’ Act, the employment of children as sweeps has all but ceased. In place of these poor wretched creatures, we have Mr. George Smart’s Scandiscope chimney-brush, and the various improvements upon it, none of which can _suffer._ — I wrote “the employment of children,” but I ought perhaps to have written “enslavement and torture,” for that is what the situation of these pitiful mites came to. Sold at five or six years to their masters; forced to scramble, nude or nearly so, up narrow flues thick with soot that not infrequently suffocated them; their raw, bleeding knees and elbows irrigated with brine to toughen their skin; their bones deformed by daily compression in those Stygian spaces! 

And even that was perhaps not the worst. For the soot invaded every bodily fold and crevice, working its slow evil. A sweep might survive his “apprenticeship” only to find, a decade or two later, a lesion, called by that class of person “soot-wart,” in his privy parts. Promptly excised, this “wart” — in fact, a cancer — might not spread; but imagine, if you will, what terrors such surgery held, in the days before the anaesthetic properties of ether were understood. Even the strongest might quail. 

By the date of which I write, of course, the science of anaesthesia had considerably advanced; though, as any medical man (perhaps in this day and age I should say “medical person”) knows, it is the commonest of all human failings to hope that a fearful symptom will disappear if not attended to. “Has Mr. Jencks consulted a physician — a surgeon?” I asked. 

“He has — he knew the risk that followed him. The tumor was excised; but it had already spread.” And, before I could continue: “He has no family, you see. He was bought out of an orphanage — I venture to say he doesn’t know so much as the year of his birth — and he never married. He has friends, of course, but . . . ”

“Are you his oldest acquaintance, then?” Holmes must have been about two- or three-and-twenty when they met, if he was only just beginning his career. 

“I believe so. I am certainly the only one who has a physician sharing his digs. It means a great deal to know that poor Tommy will be treated kindly, Watson.”

*

We engaged a former British army nurse, Mrs. Sutherland by name, to help me tend to Tommy Jencks, and then Holmes and I went to his boarding-house in Bethnal Green to bring him back to Baker Street. 

The boarding-house was respectable and clean, and Holmes had provided the landlady with a sum sufficient to procure Tommy Jencks’s food and to pay the wage of a girl to stoke his fire and change his linens, so the situation was, if not ideal, at least decent. We found Tommy — so I must call him, for so he became to me over the few weeks of life remaining to him — abed, being weakened by the progression of his illness. His complexion was gray, his limbs wasted, and his lips compressed with pain; he was supplied with laudanum, but (as he later told me) disliked the drowsiness it brought on, though thankfully he was among those who don’t find laudanum and its kin nauseous. 

The stretcher-bearers, under my direction, bore Tommy to the ambulance wagon Holmes had engaged; big, clumsy-looking men though they were, they took the greatest of care not to jostle the patient, but even so he was perspiring and faint with pain by the time they had him up the stairs again at Baker Street and had laid him on the hospital cot we had set up in our sitting-room. I urged him in the strongest terms to accept an extra dose of laudanum in view of the strain of travel; with little resistance he agreed, and drifted off to sleep with the worthy Mrs. Sutherland keeping watch from our sofa.

*

I shall not describe Tommy Jencks’s physical condition in detail; medical persons who wish to form a general picture may avail themselves of textbooks, and for my other readers it is enough to state that he often suffered greatly from the ravages of his illness. It was possible, on many days, to strike a balance between relief of pain, and the soporific effects Tommy wished to avoid, so that, as Holmes and I took it more or less in turns to keep home during those weeks, I inevitably formed a closer acquaintance with Tommy than I ever otherwise could have, given our relative stations in life. I had not had so much of democracy since my time in the army.

— Holmes, of course, knew everyone everywhere, and had more or less friendly relations with all sorts of persons. But Tommy Jencks he had known from a lad, and it was touching to see with what tenderness he treated him — indeed, with an almost paternal affection. “Ah,” said Tommy when I remarked on Holmes’s fondness, “I never had a pa, you know, and Mr. Holmes’s being dead I expect he reckoned we was alike.” 

I was momentarily taken aback at the implicit comparison between their _mothers;_ but in my years of aiding Holmes in his cases I had met many a girl who, abandoned, found herself with child, and it was a long time since I had had the heart to condemn the poor creatures. 

Tommy went on: “It were Mr. Holmes who saw I learnt to read and calculate figures, too, and set me up in ’prenticeship.” He seemed to doze then, and I had returned to my book when he roused and spoke again as if no interval had passed: “You can’t imagine, I bet, what a _happy_ time I had.” He gave the word “happy” a bitter inflection. “After the chimneys! I were glad to stop that work, only my old master turned me out, a climbing boy being no use to him no more. I was living rough — sleeping in a cellar if I could get into one, but mainly in doorways. And then along comes this beaky fellow, I could see he had the brass and I thought maybe I can get a penny off him. So he gives me sixpence and says, _Watch that door for me two hours, and when I come back tell me who goes in and out._ I did it, best I could, and he called me a clever lad and asked my name. And then he give me a _shilling_ and a pasty. I never had either before. I ate one and stared at the other and I was that up-ended I never even knew how the pasty tasted. 

“So I thought he must want — Well, I won’t say it before you.”

“That’s all right,” I said. 

“But he said, _Buy yourself a bath, and be here again tomorrow midday._ So I did. Noon struck, and there he was. I could hardly believe it. And he had a suit of clothes for me, so again I thought he wanted me, only cleaned up, see. I went with him anyway. . . . You mustn’t think ill of me, Doctor; I’d been that cold and hungry.”

Children ought not to know of such things, but children do. 

“And course he brought me to Mr. Tyler what was a carpenter, and Mr. Tyler was my master and taught me the trade.”

“Was Mr. Tyler kind to you?” I could not imagine otherwise — Holmes would no more have sent a child to a cruel master than he would beat that child himself — but talk was the best means of occupying Tommy’s mind; talk, and listening whilst one of us, or Mrs. Sutherland, read to him, that is. At that moment the distraction didn’t serve, however: a gasp escaped our patient, and he brought his hand to his mouth with a spasm. Mrs. Sutherland at once gave a dose of laudanum, and he drifted into sleep.

*

The tale proper, of how Holmes was bested though he never knew it, begins with a morning when Tommy Jencks had been at Baker Street three or four days. Mrs. Sutherland, having changed his dressing and washed his face, was encouraging him to take a little broth, although of course we were all aware — Tommy himself included — that any project of “keeping up his strength” was a matter for fairy tales. At any rate, Tommy’s attention, which usually turned to Holmes as naturally as any man’s will turn to someone who stands in the place of an admired older brother, was all on his nurse. 

Holmes seized the opportunity to take me aside. “Watson,” he said, “I have an errand of the utmost importance to undertake. Will it trouble you very much if I leave Tommy in your sole care for a while? I hope it may be a question of a few hours, but I may need to prevail upon you until, perhaps, some time to-morrow.”

“My dear Holmes,” I replied, “you must do as you think best, of course. But you are aware, are you not, that our patient’s decline will be a rapid one?”

“That,” said Holmes, “is precisely why I must make haste. I shall return instantly, once my errand is accomplished. And I hope the result will gladden my poor friend.” 

He clasped my hand in thanks, took up his hat and his ulster, and, with a clatter down the stairs, was gone.

I could not think what Holmes might mean to do; surely he did not intend to apply to some quack for a remedy? Grieved though he was by Tommy Jencks’s case, his reason would never let him give way to delusion. Nor, for that matter, would he subject Tommy to the suffering that so often results from supposed miracle cures.

“Where has Mr. Holmes gone?” Tommy asked, once Mrs. Sutherland had completed her ministrations. 

I had to confess that I did not know; but I repeated Holmes’s assurance of a swift return. 

“Well, he does keep his promises,” Tommy said. But he turned his face to one side, so I took up my newspaper and rattled the pages as I opened it, to let him know I would not watch as he gave way. 

I was somewhat angry with Holmes, to tell the truth, though as it transpired his “errand” was of the kindest.

*

He came in late that afternoon, just as the lamps were lit, triumphant, and he was not alone. With him was a small, bright-faced woman of perhaps forty-five years, with a sharp nose like Tommy Jencks’s own. “Mrs. Wilson,” said Holmes gently, “here he is. — Tommy, this lady is your mother’s younger sister, Annie Jencks that was.”

Tommy glanced between Holmes and Mrs. Wilson; rather to my surprise, because I had taken no part in these introductions, he turned to me as well, with a curious, questioning look. “But — ” he said. 

Mrs. Wilson took his hand. “We never knew what became of your mother, you see. Oh, I am so glad Mr. Holmes found me!”

“And you’re my aunt Annie.” Tommy spoke wonderingly. “Mr. Holmes, I thought I had no family at all! How ever — oh, Aunt Annie! Will you kiss me?”

*

“It was not very difficult, after all,” Holmes explained, once we had taken tea — all of us but Tommy, who had only a little of Mrs. Sutherland’s beef broth. Mrs. Wilson sat beside Tommy’s cot, stroking his head. His expression was peaceful though he had postponed his evening dose so as to keep awake with his aunt.

“Perhaps you don’t remember it yourself, Tommy,” Holmes went on, “but when we first met you told me the name of the orphanage the master sweep took you from. I thought their records might reveal something of your mother’s origins, and so indeed they did. A few further inquiries, and I had Mrs. Wilson’s address.

“But I think,” Holmes said, now addressing himself to me, “perhaps you and I might go for a walk, and leave Tommy and his aunt to acquaint themselves better — what say you?”

I have often admired Holmes’s extraordinary fund of knowledge, his penetrating insight into human motives, his courage. Less frequently, perhaps, does he reveal the greatness of his heart — but I believe it is those occasions that have made me proudest to be his friend. 

*

Mrs. Wilson visited with Tommy every day, appearing after breakfast, helping Mrs. Sutherland feed him what little he was able to eat and make him comfortable for the day, and keeping him company for as long as his energies permitted. Holmes and I did not eavesdrop, of course, but in such close quarters we could hardly miss the affection between nephew and aunt. Tommy would listen smiling, with closed eyes, to Mrs. Wilson’s accounts of his mother’s girlhood and of their parents, now of course long gone from this world. 

None of Holmes’s detective skills, I thought, had ever been put to better use than in the reuniting of a dying man with the nearest family he would ever have.

*

As it transpired, I understood the situation not at all, until one afternoon perhaps a week after Tommy had come to us.

I had been called away in the small hours overnight to see a patient; the crisis had passed shortly after dawn, and I returned to Baker Street jangling with the agitation born of emergency. Tommy was awake, and Mrs. Sutherland already at work; I breakfasted with Holmes and then resolved to glance through the _Times_ before retiring. It may go without saying that I fell fast asleep in the armchair. 

Some time later, the sound of Mrs. Sutherland’s departure woke me — she had taken the opportunity of Mrs. Wilson’s arrival to visit the apothecary or to lay in soup bones for Tommy’s broth, I no longer remember which. Holmes too had gone out, I believe to look in at his brother's club. I was still somewhat befogged, and let the pleasant murmur of Mrs. Wilson's conversation with her nephew wash over me for a little while without attempting to understand their words — which in any case were no business of mine. But then I heard Tommy say, quite clearly:

“Aunt Annie, what was my mother’s name?”

Mrs. Wilson made no immediate reply, and this hesitation drew my ear more sharply than any words could have done. 

“Kate,” she said at last. I felt an anxiety, almost amounting to dread, although I was still not awake enough to be able to express to myself its source.

“It was Bridie,” Tommy whispered. “She made sure I remembered it, before she died.”

My newspaper had fallen across my lap; I remember distinctly the sound, almost a rattle, that the pages made, sliding to the floor when I sat up. 

“What on earth . . . ?” I said. I hardly know what I suspected — some scheme to fleece Holmes, perhaps — absurd though that seems.

Mrs. Wilson said, “Oh, dear lord,” and clapped her hand across her mouth. We were all three silent for a moment. 

Tommy said: “Who are you, really? You’re not me aunt Annie. I’ll lay odds I don’t have an aunt Annie.” 

“Oh, dear lord,” said Mrs. Wilson again. She reached out a hand to Tommy, who tilted his chin, turning away from her as much as he could. “Oh, Tommy, please — hear me out. I’ve been lying, it’s true, but oh! Not for the reasons you imagine. Not to hurt you, never to hurt you. I beg of you, hear me out!” 

Tommy turned toward her. His face, ashen with illness, bore an expression of remarkable dignity. “All right, then. Tell me.”

Mrs. Wilson drew her arms about herself; from my position in the armchair, I thought she might be trembling. “Mr. Holmes hired me to play a part. I was an actress, you see — ” A single sob escaped her; though I had every suspicion of her now, I found myself admiring her self-control. 

This was the story she told Tommy — for, though I was present, it was really only he to whom she at first addressed herself: 

Holmes had approached her a week ago, on the very day when he asked me to remain with Tommy because he had a vital errand to fulfill. He knew her from her days on the stage, when there had been a murder among the cast of _Ermentrude’s Inheritance,_ in which she played the mother of the ingénue. 

“Mr. Holmes told me you’d no one in the world, and he asked me to come and meet you, and say I was your family. He thought it would be a comfort to you, when you had no mother to watch over you now.”

At the look on Tommy’s face, she cried out as if struck.

“He didn’t pay me!” she exclaimed. “He hasn’t paid me so much as a sixpence. I swear it.” She turned to me, then, and burst out, “Oh, Dr. Watson, if you and Tommy don’t believe me, only ask him! Ask Mr. Holmes. I never took money — Tommy’s a good lad, and there was my child that I lost, you see.”

I would do exactly that, I was about to say, when Tommy, with a gasp of pain, pulled himself upright and took Mrs. Wilson’s hand. “No, Doctor,” he said, “I won’t ask, and don’t you, either. It were a kindness Mr. Holmes meant to do — it _is_ a kindness. I’ve liked it, having an aunt to come and talk to me. And” — he lay back, exhausted, and his next words were only a whisper — “and we don’t know, do we?” To Mrs. Wilson he said, “Did you have a brother, ever?” 

“I did,” she replied, with a puzzled frown.

“Why then, might be you’re my real aunt on my dad’s side. It could be, couldn’t it?” 

“It could,” said Mrs. Wilson. “Why not, indeed? Let’s say it could” — and she brushed the hair back from Tommy’s brow and kissed his cheek. They both now turned to look at me. I scarcely knew what to think, and yet I heard myself answer their beseeching gaze: “Not a word will he learn of this from me.”

*

Barely another fortnight had passed, when Mrs. Sutherland woke both me and Holmes well before dawn to tell us that the close was drawing near. Holmes at once dispatched a messenger to Mrs. Wilson, but though she arrived within the hour, Tommy was already gone. She sat with him for some time, holding his hand; and, before she left that day, begged the use of my scissors to cut a lock of his hair. “Tommy was a good lad,” I heard Holmes say to her; and if he sounded somewhat puzzled by her devotion, continuing as it did when the need for deception had passed — well, I would not remark on it.

Holmes gave Tommy a decent funeral; several of his fellow-carpenters attended, and Tyler his master in apprenticeship, and even the landlady of his former boarding-house. Mrs. Wilson, pale and quiet, sat beside Holmes for the service; afterward, she pressed his hand and thanked him, and then thanked me — with such a speaking glance! — for my care of her nephew, with the slightest of emphasis on the last word. Holmes, I could see, thought that emphasis was meant for his ears; but I knew what Mrs. Wilson meant by it, and assured her with sincerest feeling, that she and Tommy were more than welcome.

It was afterward, as we were walking back to Baker Street in the waning light of the October afternoon, that Holmes owned up. “Watson,” he said, “I have a confession to make, and I hope you will not be too angry with me.” He related then how he had visited workhouse after workhouse, beginning with those closest to the orphanage from which the master sweep had purchased Tommy, looking for some record of a young woman named Jencks who when she died had left a child behind. How he had hoped to find any relation at all of Tommy’s, anywhere, that the young man might not die feeling himself alone in the world. How rapidly it became evident that the task was a hopeless one, and how he then thought of Annie Wilson, whose skill as an actress had impressed him despite the vulgarity of the melodrama in which she played. 

“I did not like to deceive you, my friend,” he concluded, “but I feared your honesty might make it impossible for you to keep up the façade. At any rate, Mrs. Wilson seems to have become genuinely fond of Tommy — that’s something. I hope I did right, Watson; what do you say?”

“You did do right — I know you did,” I replied, taking his arm. I said nothing further then, nor have I ever told Holmes what happened that afternoon when Tommy asked Mrs. Wilson for his mother’s Christian name. It seems to me that, after all, my friend’s scheme succeeded in every way that matters, though his deceit entirely failed. 

And there you have the story of how a dying chimney-sweep, a retired music-hall artiste, and I together bested Holmes. It is, I believe, the only secret I have ever been able to keep from him.

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in 1895 because according to the Holmes chronology [here](http://blog.smartmemes.com/2010/03/sherlock-holmes-a-complete-chronology/) there was a stretch for which Watson doesn’t record any cases. 
> 
> “Soot-wart” is cancer of the scrotum (not the testicles). It is now rare but was prevalent among chimney sweeps and former sweeps, because, as Dr. Watson explains, they often worked naked or nearly naked (with rare or nonexistent opportunities to wash), and soot comprised a number of carcinogens. (The mechanism by which soot caused cancer was, of course, not understood in Dr. Watson’s time.) Generally the cancer struck in a man’s thirties, but the youngest patient recorded was eight. See H. A. Waldron, “On the History of Scrotal Cancer,” _Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England,_ vol. 65 (1983), pp. 420–422. The full text is available free online.
> 
> Dr. Watson’s description of the conditions under which these children worked and lived is, if anything, understated. It relies on a number of sources, most importantly the heartbreaking _The Climbing Boys: A Study of Sweeps’ Apprentices, 1773–1875_ , by K. H. Strange (Allison and Busby, 1982). Some of the “climbing boys” (probably less than 10 percent) were girls. Strange writes: 
> 
> _Before you read this book, will you cut out a nine-inch square of cardboard and remind yourself that_ that _is the size of many of the flues up which the climbing boy ... was forced to climb; and draw a seven-inch square on it: it is on record that a six-year-old girl went up a seven-inch flue._
> 
> [Sanguinity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity), commenting on this story when it appeared in the Holmestice comm on LiveJournal, pointed out this line from "The Five Orange Pips": "As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the wind cried and sobbed _like a child in the chimney_." (Italics mine.)
> 
> In the watershed year 1875 (after more than a century of campaigns to end the use of tiny children to clean chimneys), earlier legislation purportedly regulating the industry was finally given teeth. The sponsor of this legislation was [Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Ashley-Cooper,_7th_Earl_of_Shaftesbury), who was, if you can believe this, both a Tory and a decent human being; his work benefited mentally ill people, factory workers, and coal miners as well as the climbing boys: take a moment to honor his memory.


End file.
